I hurried off the stage and immediately sat back down at my seat.
No one at my table even looked at me.
Later that afternoon, Stewart called me into his office. “I heard you were at the employee picnic and you won the grand prize.”
He heard? He was there.
I nodded, saying nothing.
“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time socializing on company time. I would think with your deadlines and all the work you have to do, you’d spend a little less time with your friends and a little more time on your assignments.”
I stared at him. “Attendance at the picnic was required. I wouldn’t’ve gone — ”
“You do a lot of gabbing with your buddies during work hours, don’t you?”
“What buddies? I don’t know anyone here. I come, do my job, and go home.”
He smiled slightly, a hard, mirthless smile. “That’s your problem, Jones. Your attitude. If you put a little more effort into your work and started thinking of this as a career instead of just a job, you might get somewhere in life. It would behoove you, I think, to be a little more, of a team player.”
I did not even bother to respond. For the first time, I noticed how empty and bare Stewart’s office looked. There was nothing to indicate its occupant’s personal tastes or interests. There were no framed photos on the desk, no knickknacks or plants in the room. The few papers tacked to the bulletin board on the wall were all memos or official company notices. The pile of magazines on the corner of the desk were all technical journals whose address labels were imprinted with the name and P.O. box of the corporation.
“Jones?” Stewart said. “Are you listening to me?”
I nodded.
“Why haven’t you been submitting your biweekly progress report?”
I stared at him. “You told me I didn’t have to turn in a report. You said that was only for the programmers.”
A trace of a smile touched his lips. “This requirement is clearly stated in your job description, which I suggest you take the time to read.”
“If I had known it was required, I would have done it. But you told me specifically that I didn’t have to turn in a progress report.”
“You do.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me that before? Why did you wait this long before letting me know?”
He glared at me. “As I’m sure you’re aware, your performance review is coming up in a few weeks. I’m afraid I have no choice but to make note of your poor work attitude and continual insubordination.”
Insubordination?
This isn’t the fucking army, I wanted to say. I’m not your slave, you fascist son of a bitch.
But I said nothing.
When he was through with his diatribe, I went back to my office.
Derek looked up when I returned. That in itself was unusual. But what was even stranger was that he actually spoke to me.
“Were you at the picnic?” he asked.
I was still ticked off at Stewart and was tempted to give Derek a taste of his own medicine, to not answer him, to ignore him and act as though he weren’t there. But I couldn’t do it. “Yeah,” I said, “I was there.”
“Do you know who won the drawing? The grand prize?”
Was this a joke? I frowned at him.
“It’s for the employee newsletter,” he explained. “I’ve been asked to compile a list.”
“I won,” I said slowly.
He looked surprised. “Really? Why didn’t you go up and collect your prize, then?”
“I did. Here it is.” I picked up the certificate from my desk and waved it at him.
“Oh.” He started writing, then looked up at me. “What’s your first name?” he asked.
This was ridiculous.
“Bob,” I found myself answering.
“Last name?”
“Jones.”
He nodded. “It’ll be in the next issue of the newsletter.”
He went back to his work.
He did not speak to me for the rest of the day.
Jane was not there when I came home. There was a note from her on the refrigerator telling me that she’d gone to the library to find some books on the Montessori method of teaching preschool children. It was just as well. I wasn’t in the mood to either talk or listen to anyone else. I just wanted to be alone and think.
I popped a frozen burrito into the microwave.
After my short conversation with Derek, I had not been able to concentrate on work for the remainder of the afternoon. I had placed papers before me on my desk and, pen in hand, had pretended to read them, but my mind had been on anything but instruction manuals. I kept going over everything Derek had said, searching for something that would indicate he had been joking or playing with me, not willing to believe that he really had not known my name. I kept wishing he had asked for the spelling. That at least would have allowed me a legitimate out. I could have rationalized that he had known my name but had not known the spelling.
But that wasn’t the case.
No matter how much I replayed that conversation in my head, no matter how much I tried to analyze what we both had said, I kept reaching the same conclusion. He had not known my name, though we’d been sharing an office for over two months. He had not seen me win the drawing, though I had stood on the stage in front of him.
I was invisible to him.
Hell, maybe the reason he never talked to me was because he didn’t even notice I was there.
The bell on the microwave rang, and I took out my burrito, dropping it on a plate. I poured myself a glass of milk and walked out to the living room, turning on the TV and sitting down on the couch. I tried to eat and watch the news, tried not to think about what had happened. I blew on my burrito, took a bite. Tom Brokaw was reporting the results of a recent AIDS poll, looking seriously into the camera as a the image of a caduceus flashed on the blue screen behind him, and he said, “According to the latest New York Times — NBC poll, the average American believes — ”
The average American.
The phrase jumped out at me.
The average American.
That was me. That’s what I was. I stared at Brokaw. I felt as though I were sick and my illness had been successfully diagnosed, but there was none of the relief that would have accompanied such a medical breakthrough. The description was true, as far as it went, but it was also too general, too benign. There was reassurance in those three words, the implication of normalcy. And I was not normal. I was ordinary, but I was not just ordinary. I was extra ordinary, ultra ordinary, so damn ordinary that even my friends did not remember me, that even my own coworkers did not notice me.
I had a weird feeling about this. The chill I’d felt when Lois and Virginia had insisted they’d seen me at Stacy’s birthday lunch was back. This whole thing was getting way too freaky. It was one thing to be just an average guy. But it was quite another to be so… so pathologically average. So consistently middle-of-the-road in every way that I was invisible. There was something creepy about it, something frightening and almost supernatural.
On an impulse, I reached over and picked up yesterday’s newspaper off the table. I found the Calendar section and looked at the boxed statistics that showed the top five films of the past weekend.